And I am sure the reason that there are not so many female professional cooks out there is because women don't have a 'natural' or 'innate'
ability to cook.
--One of those 'unnatural' women who got a Ph.D.
in Mathematics.

Ivy League, Schmivy League

Funny, I don't recall seeing Summers' name on any plenary talks in science, or on books featured in NY Review of Books or other venues for "public intellectuals", or for that matter anywhere else. No novels, no widely recognised awards, no distinguished stint as a technical advisor to the government - what has this guy been doing?

Does vice president and chief economist for the World Bank, or Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton, not count as a "distinguished stint as a technical advisor to the government"?

He's a good economist, but appears to lack people skills. Summers has been putting his foot in his mouth as Harvard president for some time; he caused the African American studies department to lose a couple of its top scholars, including Cornel West.
http://bertrandrussell.blogspot.com/2004/08/good-thing-that-harvard-rejected-me-or.html

Your are learning now that Larry Summers is a jerk?

The Lawrence Summers World Bank Memo:
http://www.jacksonprogressive.com/issues/summersmemo.html

QUOTE: Back on December 12, 1991, the chief economist for the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, wrote an internal memo that was leaked to the environmental community, and we, in turn, publicized it....

TEXT OF MEMO (excerpt):

DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution
FR: Lawrence H. Summers
Subject: GEP

'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:

1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.

2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always though that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City.

Summers still isn't a scientist or mathematician.

Some might see an affiliation with the World Bank or with the IMF as being borderline criminal.

It was the "dirty" memo that led The Multinational Monitor to create its "Lawrence Summers Memorial Award." Every month, it honors corporate folk who echo all that's good and right about that sterling representation of society... In Feb. '02, for instance, the award went to the company that hawks Botox. :p

Just like Talking Barbie said: "Math is hard!"

oi...

Lawrence Summers, using his own generalizing theories, would be a very good candidate for proof of the theory that men shouldn't be allowed to hold jobs that require talking talents. If I was as stupid as he is in making such sweeping gender generalizations in a world which still has too many cultural factors to adjust before we could even start assessing what inherent differences there might be betwen some average members of the genders.

Jessica, I hope you don't mind if I blog on this tomorrow? With proper credit for you, of course.

The Peter Principle, proven yet again.

As my post pointed-out before it was deleted: Had he said that women's brains are superior to those of men, we'd be nodding in sage agreement and praising how enlightened he is for saying such a thing.

It's far easier to delete such a post than say 'no' to it, I see. Probably because it rings a bit too true...

Mr. Wanker-mags is back!

I am afraid you have been misled about the circumstances. It's a shame, I like your site.

Summers did not say what you are suggesting.

Read:

http://gothamimage.blogspot.com/2005/01/summers-and-nancy-hopkins-at-harvard.html

Gotham Image--the only shame is your belief someone disagreeing with you means that they're "mislead"

Larry Summers also won the John Bates Clark medal, which is considered by many to be even more prestigious than the Nobel Prize in economics. He is also the youngest person ever to earn a tenured professorship at Harvard, at the age of 28. The man is brilliant.

I don't understand what the big deal about the "dirty" memo is, either. If you've got to have polluting industry, may as well put it where nobody lives.

I also want to know what's wrong with Dr. Hopkins: Does she really want would-be respectable female academics to go about putting on fainting spells to get attention? I blog about that, too.

Oh, let me include a link, too:
http://downwithbush.blogspot.com/2005/02/big-wtf-moment-at-ny-times-larry.html

Did anyone even read the transcript or just take the word of a hyperventilating sister?

www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005/nber.html

Did anyone read the full transcript? Especially the so-called “news” commentators???

Summers seemed to me to be a model of academic integrity, including disclaiming at the outset that he had any professional expertise as well as being willing to comment on a full selection of papers in a field in which he fully acknowledged he was a non-expert.

For starters, he suggested three possible explanations, incl. a possible "innate gender difference" for the under-representation of women in science, and for all of them, he said there was not enough evidence to say definitively--either from the papers at the conference, or more widely in his experience, reading, etc—what the causes were.

The transcript makes very clear, he was trying to provoke his audience into hypothesis testing and doing more research & not simply claiming "discrimination" as the cause for under representation. About discrimination, he offered the economist's observation that if there were systematic discrimination that resulted in a equally qualified pool of candidate as those hired, economic theory suggests that some high level university would break ranks and hire the "discriminees" and get a world-beating department at bargain prices--something that does not seem to have happened.

He also offered the statistician’s observation, that the farther that one got from the mean ability of a “normal” distribution—i.e. at the v. high ends of the “ability” scale we could expect for Ivy league science departments--that very small differences (of whatever origin—social/cultural/POSSIBLY innate differences) this would translate into huge variance in the applicant pool. Translated—it wouldn’t take much “X-factor” at this distance from the mean (as he puts it, 3 or four std deviations out, or the 1/10,000 candidate) for the applicant pool to not reflect the “normal” gender balance.

More interesting (and almost totally lost in the hue and cry), was his first hypothesis--what he called the “high powered job hypothesis”--that he thought should be tested (based in part on anecdotal evidence such as a woman reporting on the subsequent career of her female MBA colleagues where only 2 out of 30 female colleagues were continuing in high level positions & thus skewing the gender balance of executives 30 yrs after her Harvard MBA class had started to seriously include large numbers of women), was that woman were POSSIBLY backing away from the 80 hr. career choices, through a combination of lack of institutional support (i.e. child care, etc., which he pointed out was not provided at Harvard for junior faculty!!!), combined with some ineluctable responsibility for child care especially in fields (science? engineering?) in which interrupted careers are not easily restarted.

Addressing at least the child care issue ought to have been the issue to be acted on, not criticizing him for suggesting that "innate differences" might play a role--which for him as another question to be tested, NOT assumed as he clearly pointed out.